Walking the Sands
by QTArbuthnot
Summary: The War Doctor's thoughts as he walks across the desert to the place where he intends to use the Moment. Spoilers for Night of the Doctor and Day of the Doctor. I OWN NO PART OF DOCTOR WHO.


The heat-haze from the seemingly-endless sand obscured his destination, giving one the impression that no-one had ever set foot here before – a vast sandy plain surrounded by distant mountains. Of course, once he had achieved his purpose no-one _would_ ever have set foot here, nor in the surrounding space to a distance of several megaparsecs. He couldn't be exactly certain how much would cease to exist - cease to have ever existed – because no-one had ever been mad enough to deploy the Moment before. He was mad enough now – he would tolerate the war-madness no more.

He remembered...

Cass: last surviving member of a ship's crew, who had just wanted to see the universe, and was too filled with hate to accept having her life saved by a member of a species responsible for such devastation. He still wore the leather bandolier he had taken from her dead body as a talisman of why he fought - and as a handy place to keep his sonic.

He stopped, and adjusted his burden. The sands ahead seemed as endless as ever, but when he turned around, he could no longer see the TARDIS. What he had to do, he could not do in the presence of his oldest and most steadfast companion. She might have her own ideas about navigation, but she'd never failed him. He was failing her now; failing the whole universe. He could not, however, allow things to continue as they were. No more would he fight. No more would anyone fight. No more.

He remembered...

Ohila: High Priestess of the Sisterhood of Karn. She had 'rescued' him from the wreckage of Cass' crashed ship, because according to the Sisterhood's prognostications (a remnant of old Gallifrey, before the rise of the Time Lords, their foretellings were reliable) he was 'The One To Save Us All' from the ravages of the war. Her elixir had directed his regeneration to make him the warrior he needed to be to recompense Cass, whom he couldn't save. The sisterhood had also brought the TARDIS out of the wreckage. She had had to self-repair and when she was finished, the grandiose and baroque internals favoured by his previous incarnation had all gone, to be replaced by a more spartan and military design, the round things on the walls that had been part of the control room's original décor the only reminder of his previous lives.

On he trudged. The blue skies reminded him of Earth, probably his favourite planet in the universe, and the home planet of many of his past companions. One might even say that it was Earth where it all began, where his former persona, 'The Doctor', had been born. It was the simplicity of the human view of the universe that had stripped away the last vestiges of Time Lord insouciance and derision for the 'lesser races' left in his personality. These were the very things he had rebelled against in the first place, leading him to steal an old TARDIS from a repair yard (he was considered too unstable to be granted one for his own use) and flee Gallifrey in the company of his granddaughter. It had taken humans to show him how much of what he despised was still part of himself; to show him how to get 'involved' in the affairs of others; to help; to heal.  
Not all his companions had been human though: his last had been a Quargh – Re'iz the Extemporizer. Like the rest of the Quargh, however, Re'iz was no more.

He remembered...

Re'iz the Extemporizer: last of his companions, and the one most familiar with time. His people, the Quargh: dog-sized, exoskeletal, and centaur-like; had been on the verge of true temporal control; which would have placed them among the 'great races' of the universe, as the Time Lords would see it. Because of this, they were seen as a potential ally and/or threat to the warring factions of the Time War.

Contrary to the perceptions of most of the peoples of the universe, the Last Great Time War was not just a war between Gallifrey and Skaro, devastating as that would be in its own right; but rather a jockeying for position between all the Chronotechnic races throughout the universe. The Time Lords and the Daleks were merely the last two left standing, the others having been destroyed – some were reduced to a pre-technological state, some exterminated utterly, and still others erased from history with only those doing the erasing remembering that they ever existed. One of the war's factions, the Army of Meanwhiles and Neverweres was composed entirely of beings from these lost civilizations who had somehow survived into a phase of the war in which they no longer truly existed. Re'iz was one such – his epithet 'the Extemporizer' was a term used by the Quargh for one who could exist outside time: _ex tempore_ in its truest meaning. I had known him while the Quargh still existed. I'd been trying to recruit them to Gallifrey's cause, or at least keep them out of the war, when a reality-shifting device was deployed against them (possibly Dalek, but it could have been any of a dozen others) causing them never to have existed. Re'iz continued to exist because he was in my TARDIS discussing the military situation, when suddenly there was no military situation to discuss. As a 'neverwere' (one whose people had never existed in this reality) he was a natural recruit for the AMN, but the program espoused by its leader, the Could've Been King; the obliteration of all the war's combatants from all possible histories was utterly repellent to him, and so he stayed with me, trying to find a way to restore his people to existence, until, a day or a lifetime ago, despairing, he dispersed his being into the time vortex: another victim of the madness.

He stopped again. A low, barn-like building stood on the horizon, where no such building had any reason to be. Shouldering his load, he continued on; striding more purposefully now. He reached the door, opened it and went inside. Soon the war, all those who pursued it, and sadly, all those in its path would be no more. There was no longer a choice for him. No more Daleks. No more Time Lords. No more war. No more.


End file.
